Gaming establishments and vendors continue to address growth in the gaming industry with automation. For example, it is now common for gaming devices to be connected to remote processing sites for purposes of automated management and control of the gaming devices.
Networking gaming devices to remote processing sites does present a variety of challenges. For instance, gaming applications associated with betting games, which execute on the gaming devices, can become infected or corrupted causing gaming applications to malfunction or to become inoperable. In some cases, corruption may result in a problem with the initial software that only surfaces when certain gaming applications' states are reached during execution. In other cases, administrators may unknowingly perform operations on the gaming applications that corrupt the software; these operations may be related to boot sequences for the gaming device, related to upgrades, related to installs, etc. In still other situations, corruption may occur by a malicious intruder that is able to penetrate the gaming network or the gaming device with a software virus.
To detect software corruption, a variety of software authentication techniques have been used by the gaming industry. For example, one popular technique uses algorithms to generate a relatively small number value for a large amount of data. This number value is generated on the gaming device for the data that represents an image of the gaming applications resident on the gaming device. The number value is then sent over the gaming network to the remote processing site where it is compared against a known and predetermined number value. If the two values (generated and known) do not match, then administrators know that the gaming applications have been tampered with or have otherwise become corrupted.
With the number value technique, processing throughput can be challenging particularly when the data that is used to generate the number value is voluminous. This is particular true with more recent gaming devices which may have storage media that houses multiple gaming applications, each of which may occupy a large portion of the media.
Consequently, when authentication is performed the gaming machine may be inoperable for extended periods of time while it is generating a number value. Moreover, authentication may be automatically performed when relatively harmless events occur, such as when the gaming machine's door is opened simply because a coin jammed. When the gaming machine is not operational, the casinos are losing potential revenue. Typically, authentication delays of 2-5 minutes may be tolerable, but with the size of modern gaming devices' media that delay can easily extend for delays over an hour.
In addition, with the number value authentication technique an intelligent software virus may be able to detect what number value is being expected by the remote processing site. As a result, even if some gaming applications are corrupted the remote processing site can be tricked into believing that no corruption exists at all.